Book Review – Measures of Success:

In today’s post, I am reviewing the book, “Measures of Success”, written by Mark Graban. Graban is a Lean thinker and practitioner. Graban has written several books on Lean including Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen. Graban was kind enough to send me a preview copy of his latest book, Measures of Success. As Graban writes in the Preface, his goal is to help managers, executives, business owners, and improvement specialists in any industry use limited time available more effectively.

The book is about Process Behavior Charts or PBC (Statistical Process Control or SPC). Graban teaches in an easy way how to use Process Behavior Charts to understand a process, and truly see and listen to the process. The use of PBC is a strategy of prevention, and not a strategy of detection alone. PBCs help us see when a process is in control and whether what we see is indicative of normal noise present in a process in control or not. Walter Shewhart, who created and pioneered SPC, defined control as:

A phenomenon is said to be controlled when, through the use of past experience, we can predict at least within limits, how the phenomenon may be expected to vary in the future. Here it is understood that prediction within limits means that we can state, at least approximately, the probability that the observed phenomenon will fall within the given limits.

 Shewhart proceeded to state that a necessary and sufficient condition for statistical control is to have a constant system of chance causes… It is necessary that differences in the qualities of a number of pieces of a product appear to be consistent with the assumption that they arose from a constant system of chance causes… If a cause system is not constant, we shall say that an assignable cause is present.

Graban has written a great book to help us decide what is noise and what is meaningful data. By understanding how the process is speaking to us, we can stop overreacting and use the saved time to actually make meaningful improvements to the process. Graban has a great style of writing which makes a somewhat hard statistical subject easy to read. I enjoyed the narrative he gave of the CEO looking at the Bowling Chart and reacting to it in the third chapter. The CEO was following the red and green datapoints, and reacting by either pontificating as a means of encouragement or yelling “just do things right” at her team. And worse of all, she thinks that she is making a difference by doing it. Just try harder and get to the green datapoint! Graban also goes into detail on Deming’s Red Bean experiment that is a fun way of demonstrating the minimal impact a worker has on normal variation of the process through a fun exercise.

Similar to Deming’s line of questions regarding process improvement – How are you going to improve? By what method? And How will you know?, Graban also provides three insightful core questions:

1. Are we achieving our target or goal?
2. Are we improving?
3. How do we improve?

We should be asking these questions when we are looking at a Process Behavior Chart. These questions will guide in our continual improvement initiatives. Graban has identified 10 key points that help us reflect on our learning of PBCs. They are available at his website. They help us focus on truly understanding what the process is saying – where are we and should we make a change?

Graban provides numerous examples of current events depicted as PBCs. Some of the examples include San Antonio homicide rates and Oscar Ratings. Did the homicide rate significantly go down recently? Did the Oscar ratings significantly go down in the recent years? These are refreshing because they help solidify our understanding. This also provides a framework for us to do our own analysis of current events we see in the news. Graban also provides an in-depth analysis of his blog data. In addition, there are several workplace cases and examples included.

The list of Chapters are as follows:

• Chapter 1: Improving the Way We Improve
• Chapter 2: Using Process Behavior Charts for Metrics
• Chapter 3: Action Metrics, not Overreaction Metrics
• Chapter 4: Linking Charts to Improvement
• Chapter 5: Learning From “The Red Bead Game”
• Chapter 6: Looking Beyond the Headlines
• Chapter 7: Linear Trend Lines and Other Cautionary Tales
• Chapter 8: Workplace Cases and Examples
• Chapter 9: Getting Started With Process Behavior Charts

The process of improvement can be summarized by the following points identified in the book:

• If we have an unpredictable system, then we work to eliminate the causes of signals, with the aim of creating a predictable system.
• If we have a predictable system that is not always capable of meeting the target, then we work to improve the system in a systematic way, aiming to create a new a system whose results now fluctuate around a better average.
• When the range of predictable performance is always better than the target, then there’s less of a need for improvement. We could, however, choose to change the target and then continue improving in a systematic way.

It is clear that Graban has written this book with the reader in mind. There are lots of examples and additional resources provided by Graban to start digging into PBCs and make it interesting. The book is not at all dry and has managed to retain the main technical concepts in SPC.

The next time you see a Metric dashboard either at the Gemba or in the news, you will definitely know to ask the right questions. Graban also provides a list of resources to further improve our learning of PBCs. I encourage the readers to check out Mark Graban’s Blog at LeanBlog.org and also buy the book, Measures of Success.

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Ubuntu At the Gemba: